QHSR ICR Redux 06-30-09

DHS published a second 30-day information collection request (ICR) notice in today’s Federal Register for their new public information collection effort for the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. As I promised in my blog posting about the first ICR (published on June 2nd) I am providing additional information as it becomes available. According to this latest ICR notice DHS is currently planning on holding three ‘collaboration events’ on-line. They will be ‘held’ for five days on July 16-20, August 13-17, and September 17-21. The public will be invited to provide input on Homeland Security topics in which they are interested. Participants input will include (74 FR 31287):

“Comment and rate phase I solicited input, thereby prioritizing those concepts and suggestions they deem critical and which should be considered by the study groups during their respective reviews. “Comment on and rate proposed strategic objectives and key strategic outcome statements for the homeland security mission areas under review. “Vote on proposed mission objectives and outcome statements as to whether they agree or disagree with the proposed content.”

QHSR Study Groups will prepare input for the first two collaborative events and the feedback from each will be included in subsequent Study Group deliberations. The final Study Group reports will be ‘evaluated’ and voted upon by the public in the final collaborative event in September. The public will be notified of the actual content that will be included in the collaborative events on the QHSR web site. Additional communications options being considered include announcements via the FedBiz network and a variety of social networking site/tools such as Facebook and Twitter. I will certainly include such announcements in my blog postings. Again, this sounds like it may be a very good tool for the government to get detailed public input into the policy development process. For this to work effectively, it will require a lot of detailed input from a wide variety of people. I certainly encourage all members of the chemical security community to participate in this process.